Monday, October 02, 2006

I came home and found a vaccuum cleaner just sitting in the hallway of my building. My new room has carpeting, but this whole grad-school thing has gotten in the way of my researching and purchasing vaccuum cleaners, and so the floor just keeps getting worse. So you can imagine my delight at this discovery. I bring the thing down to my room, and discover that it is broken in several ways, not to mention missing some key parts, to the extent that it could barely even be called a vaccuum cleaner anymore. It's now just sitting in my room, and perhaps will be for quite some time. Grr.

That's Grr #2. Grr #1 relates to my university's library, where I spent most of this afternoon dealing with utter nonsense that never, ever would have happened at the glorious Regenstein. First off, wireless. At Chicago, to log onto library wireless, you just, you know, log on. At NYU, you need to go down to the basement and have a student worker install a special program on your computer. This took about a hundred years, during which time I tried to think how best to manage the rest of my time before meeting Carlos and Katherine this evening.

Eventually my computer was equipped with wireless powers, so I headed down to the sub-basement to get a book that's on reserve. I waited online (in both the New York colloquial and Internet sense, what with my new wireless) for another hundred years, asked for the book I needed, only to learn that you cannot get a book off reserve without giving some kind of special form to the person behind the desk. So I filled out said form, got back on the line, and a millenium later, learned that my ID card is not yet activated for this function. To activate an ID card, you have to go up to the first floor. Did that, went back down, and eventually got the book. Which turned out to be super interesting, chock full of French-Jewish-historical wonderfulness. But at that point it was just kind of like, whatever.

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Book forthcoming!

In Spring 2017, my first book (of many, no doubt, if I disable Netflix) will be appearing, with St. Martin's Press. Its working title is The Perils of Privilege. For a taste of what's to come, try the "YPIS" tag here.